


"Θέμις" (R., 1832)

by kasuchans



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: M/M, Post Barricade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-14
Updated: 2013-06-14
Packaged: 2017-12-14 22:52:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/842282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kasuchans/pseuds/kasuchans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire cares not for justice, nor Justice. But he cares for Enjolras.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Before

**Author's Note:**

> So my English teacher assigned us to write, for an assignment, a seventh story to "Cloud Atlas" with similar themes. This is what I gave him. ;)
> 
> Anyway, follow me on [tumblr](skywalker-anakin.tumblr.com)!

_I turn the music up, I got my records on/_   
_From underneath the rubble sing a rebel song/_   
_Don't want to see another generation drop/_   
_I'd rather be a comma than a full stop/_   
_—"Every Teardrop is a Waterfall," Coldplay_

 

In the end, it is eight bullets. Seven, and one more. Luck perverted. Grantaire would drink to that, but then again, Grantaire will drink to pretty much anything. To commemorate (the rare event of) a picture sold, or (the far more common event of) a painting left to dry and darken. (That is, if Grantaire manages to finish a piece at all. Those days, it was far more common to find him curled around a bottle in a corner of the Musain, lips tugged up in a perpetual smirk, though his clouded eyes betray him. He would gesture wildly and speak for five, ten, fifteen minutes, words full of Greco-Roman references and cynical despair but voice desperate, pleading, raw and ragged and full of _want._ ) That was then. This is now.

But now is the endgame, staring down the barrel of a gun, and Grantaire isn't ready to let the story begin there. No, his Apollo, his Achilles, his Orestes, will not die without having first lived.

*

The first canvas is done within the span of a single night. Grantaire is drunk and wielding his paintbrush like a soldier brandishes a sword: wildly, deftly, intending to wound. He's not sure how long he paints, but he does know that by the time he finishes, the sun is creeping across golden curls and brilliant blue eyes are staring at him from the canvas and even in this weak facsimile Enjolras is beautiful, terrible, beautiful, and so Grantaire closes his eyes. What else can he do? He is an abandoned apprentice, a winecask, a disbeliever. He would fall at his feet, but Enjolras would only lower his hand to raise him, and Grantaire is, and never will be, worthy enough to make Enjolras stoop so.

*

It's two weeks and two more paintings before Grantaire even dares to speak. (True, it is the absinthe more than Grantaire that is daring, but to his muddled mind this is a mere triviality.)

"And what if the people fail to rise? What then, O leader? Will we break down their doors and pull them forcibly into the light they do not see? When will it stop? When they are bound by the whims of a dictator—no, not a dictator, the _leader_ of the _republic_ —to a freedom they did not ask for and did not want?" By the end of his speech, Grantaire is halfway across the room, though he fails to remember standing up. But Combeferre is looking at him with worried eyes, and even Bahorel is tugging at his sleeve.

"Grantaire, you should sit—"

"I'm sorry, dear leader, but you can't imagine that the whole of Paris will be as quick to toss away the safety of stability for an uncertain future that last time only ended in bloodshed!"

At this, the Musain falls silent. Even the scratches of Enjolras's pen have stilled. He turns, gaze icy beneath the tendrils that have escaped his ponytail. "The people will rise. They must. They will see." Then, quieter: "Unless they lack conviction."

"I can believe," Grantaire says, his breath warm on Enjolras's neck (and when did he get so close to him, funny, he can't remember), and Enjolras's hand is firm on his wrist, supporting him like the wine never does, solid where liquid is not.

"Grantaire." His voice is low, but steady, as if he's delivering a speech to an audience of one.

"I do believe."

Enjolras's eyes meet his, sternly, but when Grantaire pauses for breath there's just enough curiosity in them for him to barrel ahead without daring to glance back.

"I believe in you."

Enjolras's fingers tighten minutely around his wrist, but Grantaire must have imagined it, for the next second he is steps away, back turned as he confers with Combeferre about the next protest once more. He sits back down at his table, fingers grasping around until they find the smooth, solid glass of his bottle. He downs half the remaining liquid with one swallow, eyes never straying from Enjolras's golden, near-glowing with energy, figure.

*

When Enjolras gives Grantaire a way to help, he is genuinely, wholly trying. He goes to the Rue Barriere du Maine. He does. ( _I have a vague ambition in that direction_ , he had sworn, he reminds himself.) He doesn't even glance at the bar more than thrice before moving on to the men in the back room. _Students_ , he ascertains after a cursory once-over. _Romantics_ , after another (because if by now he still wasn't able to tell in under a minute, Bahorel would kill him).

"Dominoes?" offers one. "We've an open place at the table."

He intends to talk politics with them. He does. But he can't spring such an idea on them right away—it is treason, no matter how kindly they couch it, and these men haven't proven themselves yet as friend or foe. He swears to himself, one game to test the waters.

One games turns into two, then three. Soon he's down to his shirtsleeves, his waistcoast having been wagered, lost, and wagered again. The door creaks, and Grantaire freezes with a tile in his hand, just long enough to lose sight of his play.

"Domino," his opponent says (the third man having left long ago). "That's seven."

"Bitch!"

There's a thud as the door slams shut, and Grantaire catches sight of blond and red through the dirt-smeared window. Blond and red and—oh.

Enjolras.

_The Barriere du Maine._

He all but sprints out, hair falling limply in his face as he looks wildly left and right for Enjolras. "Enjolras!" The light rain renders his call muted, muffled even to his own ears. "Enjolras!"

The waitress comes out to him with his waistcoat and a bill, which he signs hurriedly with a sloppy "R" before heading towards his apartment, fumbling with his sleeves as he runs.

*

The door rattles upon Grantaire's entry, who shucks his coat as he heads for his bedroom, grabbing a bottle with one hand and a paintbrush with the other. Once inside, he takes a swig—of Bahorel's years-old moving-in present, apparently—before stripping himself of his shirt. He wets the paintbrush with his tongue, using his teeth to shape the bristles—pointed, this time, like a knife—and he has his head tilted back for another gulp of wine when he hears a sharp gasp.

Grantaire all but chokes, spluttering saliva and wine into the crease of his elbow. "Enjolras! What—what—what— _why_ are you in my room?" _And on his bed_ , his mind helpfully supplies for him, but _really_ , that's not the point. "This is—this is—this is my room," he finishes, rather unimpressively.

Enjolras snorts. "I'd rather noticed that once you started undressing yourself." And _oh_ , Grantaire looks down, and he's definitely not at his most presentable. He fumbles for a shirt, any shirt, on the floor, but soon gives up on finding one without paint or oils on it. Instead, he settles himself on the floor, as far away from his bed as he can.

The air is still, and for the span of a heartbeat or two the only movement in the room is that of the shadows that dance on the walls. Then:

"The dominoes."

The nod he receives is curt, but really, he hadn't expected anything more.

"I failed you." This time, a head-shake. "It's true. In the basest sense. You gave me a mission to carry out, and I did not. The very definition of failure."

His profile is illuminated just so, and Grantaire's fingers itch to capture the proud jut of his nose, his high cheekbones, the soft-sharp glint of candlelight in his eyes. "It is not failure," he says at last, "because I did not expect anything more."

Grantaire's exhale seems to go on forever. "Then why," he says, slowly, choosing each word like a blind man chooses a step, "did you come here?"

Well. If _that_ was forever, than _this_ is eternity. Because Enjolras sits there until the candle burns low, and neither of them have moved. Their eyes occasionally lock, but all that seems to say is an unspoken agreement that Grantaire's mind is not yet privy to.

When the candle releases a single twist of smoke, the only bright spot in a now-dark room, Enjolras opens his mouth (and Grantaire can _hear_ it in the silence, that's how truly silent it is).

"I came," he says, quiet as the smoke itself, "because I wasn't angry."

He feels, rather than sees, Enjolras settle himself on the floor beside him. "Why?"

"Because I was not angry," he repeats. "And I wanted to know why."

Grantaire lets out a soft huff. "You believe _I_ can tell _you_ of the inner workings of your mind? I barely understand the movements of my own cogs."

"I know, now," continues Enjolras, as if he hasn't heard. "I understand."

"Do you."

Grantaire expects... well, he doesn't know what he expects, after this. A verbal cut-down, (though that would have happened hours previous). A slap, perhaps (though not from Enjolras, never from Enjolras). In his wildest hopes, maybe even a gentle touch of skin on skin.

Minutes go by before Grantaire chances to speak. "Enjolras?"

The room is silent—no, not silent. Empty.

*

The Musain is deafening when Grantaire returns a week later, though he knows not if it truly is louder today, or if his self-imposed hermitage has simply struck down his tolerance for human nature. So it's natural enough for him to lubricate his interactions with a bottle or two of Paris's finest, is it not? (It is. It always is.) Joly shoots him a worried look at the draining of the second, but says nothing.

"Enjolras," he says, rather louder (he will admit) than he had intended. "I trust my landlady saw to it you left in one piece? My building is, I must admit, quite a bit rougher than you are probably used to."

The look he earns is equal parts anger and something Grantaire can't quite put his finger on. Less than anger. "You are utterly _incapable_ ," he hisses out, "of thinking."

"Well, we all knew that." He spreads his arms wide, and a few of the group chuckle quietly, though probably ingenuinely.

"You do not _live._ "

"Why should I, when this world seems just as hasty to hurry me out as it ushered me in?"

"You cannot _feel_ , Grantaire." Enjolras sighs. "I doubt you could even die, with how stone you are."

Grantaire brandishes his—is it his third? My, how the time flies—third bottle. "You see," he says grandly. "You're the marble. I'm just a patron—no, not even—a _student_ of the arts."

"Sometimes, you seem utterly incapable of faith."

"You shall see," he finds himself saying, somehow close against his ear. "You shall see."

*

He can't say he's entirely surprised when he finds Enjolras in his kitchen later that evening, exiting his room after a bout of painting. His hands are twisted together on Grantaire's low table, fingers twining and untwining. Grantaire can't see his face, in the dark.

"You said you understood, now," he says in lieu of a greeting. "Why?"

Enjolras merely nods. "I did. I do."

Grantaire seats himself on the table itself, looking down at his own knotted hands. "Why?"

There's no answer, and Grantaire is beginning to worry once more that he's crossed some strange, unspoken line, when Enjolras stands. Grantaire is all too aware of their height difference, now, with his eyes level with Enjolras's lips. His eyes are burning bright, burning holes in the fibers of Grantaire existence, and Grantaire thinks of whores, children, _revolution_ , even, anything to keep himself from—

Their lips meet, and Grantaire doesn't know by whose movements, but it doesn't matter. It's a simple act, soft, chapped skin meeting, and it is blessedly, horridly chaste. Neither moves, and they stand like that, lips pressed, for some amount of time (Grantaire had stopped counting by then.)

Then Enjolras lets out a soft exhale against Grantaire's lips, wetting his lips with his tongue, and Grantaire is opening his mouth against Enjolras's and their tongues are meeting, touching, dancing and twining and pushing and pulling and Grantaire's hands are heavy on Enjolras's hips and.

And.

And Enjolras is _kneeling_ , and he presses his head to Grantaire's feet in a mockery of deference before—oh _God_ , "Enjolras," he gasps out. "What—"

He'll wish he could remember it better, later, but his mind is a flurry of _want_ and _feeling_ and _Enjolras_. There are sheets wrapped around ankles, and Grantaire leans forward, hands ghosting over his chest as he presses against his forehead.

"Would you—what—are you—"

"Futuamus," Enjolras mutters, between breaths. "Is that—"

"Yes, yes, _Christ_ ," and it's more than okay, and he clenches his eyes tight for just a second. There's a vial on his bedside table—Grantaire's no stranger to men, though he admits more than a few were bought—and he pauses. "Do you..."

Enjolras nods, shifting his hips. "Please."

Everything is heat, blossoming low in his stomach and curling tight and he splays a hand across the once-white sheets.

*

Grantaire thinks there's definitely some danger in packing gunpowder inches from flickering candles, but he's not going to say a word. Instead he watches the way Enjolras's eyes blaze as he goads Marius onwards, tugging attention away from the god _damned_ revolution and to a girl scarcely glanced in the town square instead. After Marius leaves, in search of his fair-haired dream, Enjolras turns to his lieutenants.

"We have a larger goal," he says. "Tomorrow is the day, or not at all." He turns, and his eyes lock with Grantaire's for the briefest of moments. "Some things must be sacrificed for the greater good."

And _no_ , he can't let that one slip by, not now (not ever, but definitely not now). "But what of love? Love, whose sweet passions drive men to the battlefields for their sisters, their wives, their lovers? Is that not a noble goal in and of itself?" A few of the men nod, and he continues, emboldened. "How do you intend for the people of Paris to rise without someone to fight _for_?"

"The love of a country arcs high above that of any man," he says, without a second's pause. "There are men strong enough to fight for the future, rather than the next night's companion."

"Those men know _nothing_ of true passion!" Grantaire bursts out. "Nothing! They know a day-to-day existence of monotony and contentment, but _passion_ is what makes life worth living!"

"For some." Enjolras leans forward, and his next words are meant for Grantaire and Grantaire alone. "I fail to understand your preoccupation with flesh-and-blood bonds."

Grantaire lets the bottle slip from between his fingers. "Because I can depend on them, or hope to. Unlike your _freedom fighters_."

*

The barricade holds the first attack, but it's far from glorious. Éponine is dead in Marius's arms, and her blood stains the cobblestones. Grantaire is there when Enjolras realizes their likely fate.

"The people haven't risen," he says quietly, his face ashen. "You were—"

"No. Don't." Grantaire presses a finger to his lips. There are a few flecks of blood across his cheek from when he carried Éponine's body, like seven ink-dark stars on a marble-white sky. "Never." He won't allow Enjolras to sully those lips, that heart, with doubt. He bends down, presses his own lips to the toes of his boots. Enjolras pulls him up, roughly, by his collar, and tugs him in for a searing kiss.

There's none of the gentle passion of before. This is unbridled fury and _need_ where the other was want, and his shirt is shredded by fingernails and broken wood. His back is rubbed and scraped raw and bleeding, but it hurts in just the right way, driving home in sensation the desperation for _something_ to cling to that Grantaire refuses to allow to become words.

*

Grantaire wakes with a blinding headache and a sense of unease. It's quiet. Still. He rises from his chair to see, and his foot knocks into— _Combeferre_. He's lying on the floor, curled around another body (unrecognizable this time), and where Grantaire's stomach once was is now a pit of despair. His eye dart around the room for—voices. Upstairs.

Upstairs, he's greeted with a sight worthy of seven thousand paintings. Enjolras stands by the window, his crimson flag limp in his hand. Soldiers cut him off on all sides, each with a rifle cocked and aimed.

"There was one they called 'Apollo,'" says one of the guardsmen. "Beautiful, like a flower."

To this, Enjolras's eyes harden into ice chips as he tosses his own gun down. "Shoot me," he says, throwing his arms back. Grantaire sees, and _oh_ , how he sees. He sees the barest breeze ruffle a golden tendril loose from Enjolras's ponytail; he sees one of the guardsmen press his eyes into his sleeve before re-aiming his rifle; he sees the bodies of others littering the floor, trod upon by soldiers' shoes. He sees the streets of Paris stretching out before him, each window shuttered and many spattered rust-red.

He sees, but he does not observe, for observing requires thinking. And the cogs turn in Grantaire's head in an unusual manner, so he has barely taken in the scene before crossing to the window. "Long live the Republic!" he shouts. "I'm one of them." He turns to Enjolras, who has gone wholly unreadable. His eyes are soft again, but curious, and there's a different blaze behind them. Not one of lust or anger, but another. "Do you permit it?" he asks, extending a hand to him.

Enjolras smiles, an angelic, happy upwards quirk of the lips, before the bullets rip through Grantaire's chest and his gaze goes white.


	2. After

_Maybe I'm in the black, maybe I'm on my knees/_   
_Maybe I'm in the gap between the two trapezes/_   
_But my heart is beating and my pulses start/_   
_Cathedrals in my heart/_   
_—"Every Teardrop is a Waterfall," Coldplay_

 

Paris is silent, achingly silent. She mourns her fallen gracefully, elegantly, as if each life lost is cut from her with painstaking precision.

Grantaire is not, and has never been, Paris. So when he wakes, and finds himself still living, he screams. It's raw and guttural, ripped from his vocal cords and thrust into the light of day burning like the sun himself. He screams and screams, until his voice breaks for breath and his throat is rubbed too raw to go on.

He doesn't look behind him when he leaves. He doesn't take in the bodies of his friends piled in the streets, or the red flag hanging, like the river of blood that stains the cobbles, from the window.

He heads straight for the Corinthe and buys as much absinthe as he has money in his pockets. (Perhaps his bloodied appearance helps sway their prices. He knows not.)

*

The drink lasts for all of a week. Maybe it's two. At some point, Grantaire loses count of how many suns have risen and set. He counts his days in bottles, piled up in his bedroom and kitchen and hallways, lining the windowsill and scattered around his canvases. (The sheets smell of alcohol, now. It's better than before.) He drinks to forget, the guilt and anger and regret. He drinks to remember, their smiles and their glares and the way they would tilt their heads or flutter their hands. He drinks, because they can't.

He drinks.

A slip of a girl comes knocking a week after the alcohol ends. Huddled in his sheets, he yells for her to come in, fully expecting her quiet, mousey voice to dissipate down the stairs. Instead, he finds himself rudely exposed to the sun, blinking, as blonde hair and blue eyes (oh _no_ ) block his sight.

It's his angel, human once more, and his hands lash out. His right hand catches her cheek, but the redness is the only testament to it, her reaction betraying nothing.

"Grantaire, is it? Marius sent me."

"Marius... Marius lives?" She nods. _Thank the gods_ , he thinks. Someone better than him survived. "Where—how is he?"

"At my house," she says, blushing. "He's healing well."

Her blush touches a distant memory, of Marius's freckled grin and a girl much teased. It's hazy, but he figures it's worth a guess. "Cosette?"

"So you _do_ remember!" Her smile is infectious, and for the first time since, he smiles.

*

Marius is getting married, it seems, within a few month's time. He is indeed healing well, though he'll be left with a scar across his ribs. Grantaire is also scarred, but worse, as he didn't tend to them. He couldn't. (He still doesn’t know what they look like.) But today is not about Grantaire, about how he flew too close to the sun and very nearly drowned for it. Today is about Marius and Cosette, and how they inhabit the spaces each leaves behind. When the doors open, she will be a vision, he's sure. But the doors are closed, now, and Grantaire is fussing over Marius's cravat which, as expected, is tied as untidily as always.

"Steady, now," he says, trying to calm his jittery nerves. "In just a few minutes time, you'll be a married man."

Marius smiles, shyly, as if he's afraid to show it. "And Cosette a wife."

"And Cosette a wife." He gives one last tug at the offending fabric before throwing his hands up in despair. "Well, she'll forgive you your cravat."

When the doors swing open, the other attendees (only a handful—it's a small affair) crane their necks as surely as Grantaire does to see Cosette. She's a vision in white, a small smile peeking out from underneath her veil. They stare at each other throughout the ceremony, and when they pronounce the couple affirmed by law and by God, her eyes crinkle up with the force of her grin.

*

Marius's wedding, it turns out, was five months to the day: November 5. Grantaire doesn't realize this until he returns home. The dark greets him, as surely as it ever has, and he dreams that night of flame-haired angels with mouths of smoke and tongues of fire.

He wakes up a month later with the rippling red flag still waving in his mind's eye. Six months. Half a year. Half a year and Paris is still living, the world is still turning, the king still sits on the throne. Nothing has changed.

 _Nothing ever will_ , he thinks. Still, he should pay his respects. If not, he reminds himself, no one will.

It's a pauper's grave behind the local church. Anonymous and en masse, as befits a group of treasonous traitors. Still, Grantaire can't help but think that Enjolras would prefer it this way. One with the people. Not a man, but an ideal.

Something glints by the graveside, and he kneels to pick it up. It's the tip of a bayonet, broken off not more than two inches. Someone else cared enough to visit him, to visit them all. He thinks idly of Bahorel's sister, Joly's mistress. The people left behind in the wake of the storm.

 _Why_ , he thinks, _hadn't they fought for their lives?_ Because nothing has changed. Students are students, some more republican than others, and it's the way of the world. The grass is still green despite how much blood rained upon it. _You were still just a man._

Because deny it as much as he wanted to, Enjolras had earthly ties like any other. But, unlike others, he was willing to sever them.

He stabs the bayonet tip into the dirt and, untying his cravat, attaches it to the metal point. A red flag, still waving.

*

When he gets home, he remembers them. Not with thoughts or drink, or words, but with ink and oils and his brush. It's all he can do. Combeferre's spectacles, Bahorel's bruised knuckles. Smiles and hats, scowls and braids. Enjolras.

Enjolras's neck. Enjolras's chest. Enjolras's hands. His eyes, his lips, his hair. He paints them, each and every one, immortalizing him in canvas if not in history. He paints him first, setting aside each study until his wall is divided into six small canvases.

He paints _him_ , last. The man, the ideal, the whole. He consumes absinthe to make his eyes burn bright, and little else. He scarcely sleeps. The brush is electric, and each movement, each swoop and drag of paint echoes a brush of fingers over skin in the dark; each harshly punctuated splotch a memory of nails and teeth.

He leaves it to dry in the sun when he finishes, collapsing in a heap on his nest of blankets. It needs the touch of light the dawn will bring, anyways.

*

When he wakes, he sees the sunlight cresting over his painting, and _oh_ , it's _perfect_. Enjolras stares back at him, bright as the day Grantaire first saw him, full of passion in the slums as he rallied the people around him, shouting for a new day that would rise like the sun itself. That day, Grantaire had known that this was more, more than a passing fancy or a smirk-won fling. So he drank. He drank and he hid himself from those burning blue eyes so he would never have to flinch away from their gaze. Cloaked in shadows and cynicism, he could stare upwards—always, _always_ upwards—and sneer and snark, using his tongue of liquid as a shield against Enjolras's voice of flame.

He never thought that voice would die. But he's not surprised that it went out as it lived—gloriously, eternally ablaze.

He remembers Enjolras. Apollo. Helios. Justice and righteous fury incarnate.

He names the painting after him. He names it after her. Themis. Divine justice.

"Θέμις."


End file.
